TG4 lumbered with sports from the crypt

LOCKER ROOM:Wimbledon and the Tour de France are no longer capturing sports fans' imaginations, writes Tom Humphries

FUNNY, WE were hanging out of the press box in Semple yesterday, drawn moth-like toward the white-hot excitement and the fury down below. At one stage I glanced down as Cork and Clare cuffed each other about so wonderfully and Tadhg de Brún and Evanne Ní Chuilinn from RTÉ were leaning forward out of their sideline seats, their legs both tapping out the same nervous rhythm. We all shy away from being labelled fans with typewriters but it's great to be covering something you love and feel the pulse of.

I love and even half-understand what they say on TG4 but I feel a little sympathy for their plight during the so-called summer season. I mean on dark wet evenings in winter the station produces the best and most innovative Irish TV. On bright wet evenings in summer TG4 must force itself into some rí rá and ruaille buaille about Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Sports from the crypt. It's plain wrong. Mícheart. Listen, I liked tennis before they all got to be so good at it.

Once upon a time it was mandatory for a top 10 player to have a personality. They weren't exactly street kids who busted out of the ghetto with nothing but a racquet and a dream or riverboat gamblers who made their money doing trick-shots for rubes but they had more than one dimension to them. We live in a time now when Andy Murray passes for colourful, which makes Wimbledon a riot of beige. I don't really care if Nadal and Federer played for 18 hours solid to decide who won Wimbledon; neither one of them called an official the pits of the earth or stopped to conceive a child with a waitress in the broom cupboard of a restaurant between courses.

And if they had it wouldn't have mattered. What made McEnroe's precocity and Becker's indiscretions so interesting was they were original and human. Everything in tennis now seems palely derivative of its past. Agents create little bits of shock in terms of short dresses or calculated temper tantrums but nobody cares much anymore. Except those TV companies who have ended up with events which were once the glory of the summer.

I liked tennis back in the day when they had rallies that went on for enough time for you to make an Irish coffee in the kitchen and catch the winning shot. I like the old wooden tennis racquets because it looked as if they were playing with approximately the same thing that your auntie might buy you in Woolworths for the forthcoming summer tarmac season in St Anne's Park (One match and the rest of the year insisting that no, you weren't gay or well- educated or English.) I liked tennis when the players got old in front of your eyes as part of the ongoing narrative of a soap opera that you could dip into a few times a year. Now money and science have shrunk the sport. The players get rich too young and the gear is made of compounds America would invade a third world country to possess. Everyone is more muscled and carrying howitzer shoulders. It's boring. But poor oul TG4 must breathe life into it all.

You can tell it's a lost cause by looking out the window. Back in the 70s and 80s the streets followed the television. For Wimbledon fortnight kids got out and played half-assed games of tennis using the tar seams and kerbs on estate roads as the court markers. And for a while they gasped like Dan Maskell any time they made a volley or hit a drop shot. Upon my word. Then they went back to playing kerbs and three-and-in and checking the flares on their trousers.

Now the major sports have colonised the imagination. Tennis, cycling etc have only themselves to blame. Wimbledon, it has to be said, ain't quite the beaten docket the Tour de France is. Kids stop believing in the Tour de France these days long before they begin questioning the religious significance of the Easter bunny. The tour has all the sporting credibility now of an episode of Gladiators.

The Tour finished yesterday, rolling into Paris to a worldwide sigh of jaded indifference. We don't really give credence anymore to the sight of men collapsing near death at some airless summit and then getting up the next morning and doing it again week after week.

Briefly in 1987, and again when the tour came to Ireland, we were fans and experts but it was a passing fancy and cycling's last relevance rests in the hearts of those who choose to believe in and be inspired by Lance Armstrong.

Therein is TG4's problem. Lance, as he never stops telling the world, never tested positive but the darker branch of the science which cured his cancer has rendered that claim meaningless. Marion Jones passed scores of tests. So did Lance's team-mate from 1999, Frankie Andreu. Frankie would later in life become one of the many unfortunates to be frozen out of the Lance Golden Circle.

Years later, when he cleared his conscience concerning his cheating, Andreu said that when he had taken EPO he kept well within the conservative usage guidelines of suppliers. Even that made him a 20 per cent better racer, he reckoned. One can only imagine the delicious effects on men taking stronger broths in their evenings off the saddle.

Cycling suffered death through denial. Instead of healthy debate about a sport in terminal decline at the hands of drug cheats, cycling shut one eye. From Tommy Simpson to Paul Kimmage to Willi Voets to Christophe Bossons to Marco Pantani and Dr Michele Ferrari (who once succinctly captured the cynicism of the drugs fraternity by explaining that a shot of EPO was the equivalent of a large dose of orange juice) and Festina and Operation Puerta and Floyd Landis and so on, cycling was always touting itself like a new sheriff in a small western town. Everything was just about cleaned up. Safe to come back on to the streets.

Those who questioned Armstrong weren't invited to debate constructively. They were photographed by Armstrong flunkies at press conferences, rung up and abused by Armstrong himself and ostracised by the rest of the timid press pack. TG4 did none of this dark work, of course, but their summer programming creaks heavily with the deadweight of two sports which have outlasted their relevance in the world.

Isn't it odd how the world changes? There was a time when sports programming was rich and varied and seasonal. Now we merely have whatever the Premier League's off-season permits us to have and two of the sporting events which we always felt would be part of the flavour of the summer pass by dragging their asses through the schedule of an innovative minor channel. There was a time when the GAA was scared stiff of its games being live on television and we accepted the jewels of sports scheduling were just that. The jewels. Wimbledon. The British Open. Le Tour.

We have changed and it is odd indeed that yesterday as the Tour rolled into Paris, hurling was the sporting heartbeat of our nation. RTÉ folk were grinning like Cheshire cats taken to Cork. Time to pool the TG4 resources, abduct the sport, liberate Ní Chuilinn from The Sunday Game and give her all those hours. It would be a start!